


Something Like This

by Twisted_Mind



Series: Tidelands post-S1 'verse [1]
Category: Tidelands (TV 2018)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Fix-It, I Don't Even Know, Multi, Non-Graphic Violence, Post-Season/Series 01, Pre-Relationship, Rosa McTeer's A+ Parenting, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-09
Updated: 2019-03-09
Packaged: 2019-11-14 04:17:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18045314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twisted_Mind/pseuds/Twisted_Mind
Summary: The investigation. Corey, Murdoch, Leandra, Adrielle. The shards. Augie, Dylan, Bijou. Change in l'Attente. Gilles, Lamar, Rosa, Stolin. The crew. The mothers. Cal and Corey, or Cal and Dylan.It all goes something like this.





	Something Like This

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even know, okay? I binge-watched all of S1 of Tidelands and I _needed_ answers to all the burning questions, so I looked for fic--and realized I had to write it myself. So here we are. 
> 
> **Major Warning** for spoilers. Seriously, this has _all_ the spoilers. All of them. And is very canon-dependent. None of this will make sense if you haven't watched Tidelands (on Netflix), but please please PLEASE go watch it, because it's fantastic and because I need other people to scream with. If you liked TW--or TW fanfic--you will probably enjoy this show. 
> 
> Happy Friday!

 

 

It goes something like this:

She didn't know it at the time, but she saved Corey. She slowed the worst of the bleeding, was fast enough in calling it in that they were able to revive him at the hospital. It’s a good thing, too, because her fingerprints are all over his gun, with Leandra’s corpse next to him, dead from two gunshot wounds to the chest.

His statement and the record of her calling 911 are the only things that save her from going back to prison for another crime she didn't commit.

(She can hear the whispers now—“Cal McTeer did it again”, “once a killer, always a killer”, “does the mad cunt just have it out for cops, or what?”)

She doesn't know it, but Gilles finds Dylan, gasping and dying in a pool of blood that's half Adrielle's, and panics. He pulls the dagger free, and presses his small hands against the suddenly-pouring wound. He ignores the way Dylan hushes him, trying to cup his face and say goodbye, and _pushes_ , forces his almost-brother's blood to move back inside his body. He doesn't realize that Adrielle's blood goes with it, too relieved that Dylan will live, too overcome with tears to speak. He's only eleven, but he’s saved one life and almost-ended another in the same hour. Even for a Tidelander, raised to this life from the moment he was found, it’s overwhelming.

She doesn't know it in that moment, heart breaking as she saves Bijou and prays Augie will hold on, but the sirens are here not just for her, but also for Adrielle. Queen or not, Tidelander or not, she has slain too many of their children for them to forgive or overlook. Absent and monstrous they may be, but they are still mothers, and Adrielle Cuthbert, for all her pretty airs, never knew the meaning of the word.

Adrielle dies on the beach, as was foretold, but it’s not Cal that kills her. She just bears witness.

The others come down to the beach, drawn by the noise and siren-song, and can barely understand what's happened. It takes three days and revelations from Dylan, Lamar, Bijou and Gilles, with explanations from both the McTeers (because Augie is stubborn, and Cal even more so, and she refused to lose anyone else she loved that day, was willing to slay the mothers, if necessary, to keep him with her). Genevova's body is given a proper burial; the former Queen and captive deserved nothing less. They lay Bill in the ground beside her.

L'Attente is shaken. The Tidelanders don't know how to react to something like this. The commune is out of money, Adrielle spending it as fast as the smugglers handed it over, and with half the crew dead and the other half gunning for Augie's head, the cash flow has dried up. They're afraid, and several want to run, but l'Attente and Orphelin Bay is all they've ever known.

It's a mess. Cal has officially inherited a goddamn mess, and she's not equipped for this, to run the commune or lead the Tidelanders or figure a way out of the current clusterfuck, but she's somehow wound up with the job anyway. It's bad enough that she almost goes to The Devil's Tail to get drunk.

In the end, the only thing that stops her is the knowledge that Rosa will be there—it is, after all, her bar, at least until Cal can get a hold of a lawyer and find a way to get what’s hers—and there’ll be no Augie this time, to stop her from killing the woman she called “mum”, who’d never loved her because she came from the sea instead of Rosa’s womb, who’d set her up and sent her to prison, who’d plotted the deaths of all the Tidelanders, herself included.

She doesn’t know it, but there’s an official investigation launched into the police corruption in Orphelin Bay. One dead cop, another almost-dead cop, and the discovery of a body that’s been officially listed as missing for ten years in the local morgue is fishier than _The Calliope_. Corey tells them everything he knows, desperate to make this town better, different, because he wasn’t lying when he told her that it was his home, too, that he was going to stay and change it. The coroner corroborates. Cal will have her name cleared and record expunged, but it’ll take time.

Corey’s just glad the wheels are in motion. He doesn’t care if singing like a bird costs him his job. (He meant it, when he told her.)

She doesn’t know how Adrielle did it, exactly, but Cal _does_ know she can’t run l’Attente or treat the Tidelanders the way the last Queen did. So she asks, and she listens; spends days and days doing nothing more than listening to what Lamar and Gilles and Bijou, Dylan and Violca and Somoche have to tell her. And then she starts asking the others, too. She has no idea what she’s doing, but she has to start somewhere, and if she’s meant to be their new Queen, learning their fucking names and faces is as good a place as any.

Dylan waits until they’re alone to tell her how he saved Adrielle, only to have her slip the dagger between his ribs for the crime of seeing through her lies. Cal’s hands shake as she frames the wound, as she cries, because he’s the only one here she really knows, the only one who really knows her, and she’d be lost without him, for reasons she doesn’t even want to think about, let alone name. He holds her and strokes her hair; tells her it’s okay, he’s strong, he’ll heal, the same way Bijou and Augie will.

She decides, in that moment, that one of the things she will do differently is the system of punishment. Tidelanders live for hundreds of years—more than long enough to break your heart dozens of times over and collect plenty of scars. As Queen, her job isn’t to break and blind her people. It’ll be to guide them, and help them heal from their wounds—both the ones they get on their own, and the ones Adrielle left behind.

(She doesn’t know it, but in that moment, Dylan falls a little bit in love with her, and he understands what Constable Welch meant—she _is_ different from them, and living at Adrielle’s l’Attente would have changed her. Now, he hopes that’ll go in the other direction, that she’ll change l’Attente instead. He promises himself that he’ll do whatever he can to help her do it, because they need her heart, this terribly young Tidelander who cries so easily for him, who is like them in how hungry she is for care, but so different in her yearning for it.)

She doesn’t know what to think when Corey finds her. She’d spent weeks thinking he was dead, that the last thing he ever did was protect her from Leandra, and that the whole godforsaken town was spiteful enough not to tell her about the funeral, assuming any of them knew she’d have wanted to go.

She’s gentle as she unbuttons his shirt, and he lets her, understands that she needs to see it, touch the still-healing wound and his face with shaking hands. He tucks her against his side and lets her cry, tells her he’s not leaving her, or Orphelin Bay.

She doesn’t know it, but he and Dylan share a look over her head where they understand each other so intimately it’s uncomfortable. They love her, the both of them, for exactly who and what she is, for the way holding her makes recognition reverberate down their bones, the way she makes everything else disappear for a moment. Corey breaks eye contact first, but that moment is the stone tossed into water, and the ripples are in motion, gears already turning in Dylan’s head as he thinks about how they’ll make this work.

She didn’t know that the investigation into the police corruption would end with Rosa being hauled off in handcuffs for her connections to Stolin’s criminal empire, but Cal would be lying if she said it wasn’t deeply satisfying. The fact that Augie gets slapped with a suspended sentence is less so, but he’s not in prison and won’t be _going_ there if he can stay out of trouble, so Cal privately thinks it’s a win.

The fact that the rest of his former crew gets rounded up and hauled off definitely is, because it means that there’s no one trying to kill him anymore. Between the two of them, they own the house, _The Calliope_ , and The Devil’s Tail, so for the time being, she has Augie run the bar. It’s stable employment, and a source of income, which makes his parole officer happy and means she doesn’t have to worry about her brother starving. It’ll take a while to sort out the legalities, but since the bar was bought with the money her dad left her, it’s technically hers. With Rosa out of the picture—and likely never coming back, because Augie will never forgive her, and it’ll be a cold day in hell before she comes back for Cal—it’s all a matter of paperwork.

Cal and Augie are able to pin the drug trafficking on Adrielle—she _was_ their supplier, so it’s no real stretch—who has suddenly disappeared just as the whole ring unravelled. The rest of the Tidelanders are able to play innocent—and, for a lot of them, it’s not even an act, because Adrielle kept a lot from them—with the exception of Lamar and Dylan, who get off the hook by providing other helpful bits of knowledge and misdirection, and are able to truthfully swear that Adrielle would have killed them for any betrayal.

The bodies of Genevova, Bill Sentelle, and Pat McTeer are proof enough of that. Lamar’s missing eye also makes for a compelling argument.

She doesn’t know what she would do without Lamar, who’s able to quietly advise her on how to deal with the thoroughly-spooked Tidelanders, and also makes the brilliant suggestion to re-sell some of the shards. Not all of them, because like hell will Cal risk someone else assembling the goddamned thing and summoning a wave of death, but. A few. Even the sale of one would keep the commune going for a couple months.

She also sells some of Adrielle’s other treasures and personal effects. Because good riddance.

It all feels like it happens dizzyingly fast, but in reality, it takes months. Four months to completely change the realities of every single Tidelander and member of the McTeer family, to uncover just how deep the corruption went, to finally bury her dad and get her inheritance, to find a way to keep Augie and Dylan and Corey safe. Their problems are far from over, but there’s some breathing room, now. She has time to figure out where to go from here.

She doesn’t know what to do with herself.

So of course that’s when Dylan finds her, and asks to speak with her privately. He leads her into what was Adrielle’s house, and that the Tidelanders have decided should be hers, as the new Queen. She doesn’t expect to see Corey there, and freezes, suddenly unsure of what’s about to happen.

She doesn’t know that they know about each other, that they’re aware she’s lain with them both and made promises to neither. She doesn’t think she could choose if she had to. (She thinks she’ll have to, that that’s why they’re here.) She doesn’t know that they’ve talked, agreed to share and possibly more-than-share, that they’re both with her, dedicated to her, in a way that she wouldn’t believe and has nothing to do with what she is—Tidelander, Queen, childhood sweetheart—and everything to do with _who_ she is, because she learned the hard way that she doesn’t get what she wants, doesn’t get to have something like this, like them.

She doesn’t know, so they tell her.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to come hang out on [here](https://queerfictionwriter.tumblr.com/) and scream with me about Tidelanders.


End file.
